Most companies see "zero defects" as little more than a lofty aspiration.

Most companies see "zero defects" as little more than a lofty aspiration. But utilitieswhere Artemis seems to be the project-management tool of choicecram tens of thousands of maintenance tasks into a scheduled outage, and don't have the luxury of downtime. That stability counts, even for customers with less-volatile needs.
But Artemis is "not a tool you can just load on the desktop and walk away from," says VF Corp.'s David Draper. "It took us a year to get to where we felt we were fairly proficient." To make matters worse, "we went with a consultancy that wasn't very familiar with Artemis."

Lockheed Martin's Paula Ward says Artemis "has an excellent 'earned value' tool," which can be used to apportion ongoing costs. "Others might offer two or three earned-value methodsArtemis offers 13. I can calculate right away."

Artemis' Gateway module "has the look and feel of Microsoft Project sitting on top of the database," Ward says. "You can trick a user into thinking they're on Project, but it's really ProjectView behind the scenes."

Chris Dodson, at utility Wolf Creek Nuclear, says it "would be helpful if Artemis could schedule down to more-precise increments of 15 minutes or less," instead of the current hour. "We've been asking for years, but it'll require a base algorithm change"one Artemis says it has no immediate plans to make.

Praxair dropped Artemis for its technology initiatives about two years ago. The application, says CIO John F. Hill, was "a little too complex and inflexible." Praxair opted instead for software that includes a project-portfolio element, but still uses Artemis for engineering.

Artemis' reports "are fairly good for analysis purposes," says VF's Draper, "but they're not reports you'd want to distribute to a broader audience. We have to extract information out to do our reporting, using Brio queries and Excel." When Draper asked, Artemis told him that "reporting is difficult because clients use it so differently from one place to another." Ward says, "We don't worry about the weakness of their reportingthey make up for it by making you able to get the data out to do your own reporting" with other applications.

Most important, says Southern Company's Thomas Ricketts, Artemis "allows us to answer 'Who is working on what?' and 'How much is it costing?'" And that, at least, is a practical aspiration Artemis can fulfill.

Executives listed here are all users of Artemis software. Their willingness to talk has been confirmed by Baseline.

Assistant Editorjoshua_weinberger@ziffdavisenterprise.comAfter being on staff at The New Yorker for five years, Josh later traveled the world, hitting all seven continents in a single year. At Yale University, he majored in American Studies, English, and Theatre Studies.